"Computers are ubiquitous in modern life. They offer us portals to information and entertainment, and they handle the complex tasks needed to keep many facets of modern society running smoothly. Chances are, there is not a single person in Ars' readership whose day-to-day existence doesn't rely on computers in one manner or another. Despite this, very few people know how computers actually do the things that they do. How does one go from what is really nothing more than a collection - a very large collection, mind you - of switches to the things we see powering the modern world?"

This seems naive. The average person is far less intelligent than most intellectuals actually realise.

It is not purely due to poor teaching that first year university programming courses have immense failure rates.
It does seem to be beyond most people.

In France in the first year of university classes are *big* whereas they were 30-50 people in high school, students aren't supervised like they were before, they live alone for the first time, etc in these conditions the high failure rate has nothing to do with intelligence, more with lack of self-discipline|maturity.